America's Secret Space Heroes

6x60 Smithsonian Channel
Across six gripping episodes, the last surviving engineers behind America’s most spectacular achievements in space tell their incredible stories. Each episode weaves together fascinating film archive with intimate and often emotional interviews from these unsung heroes. Many of their stories have never been told on-screen before. Between them, they relive the critical turning points of audacious projects such as Apollo, the Space Shuttle and NASA’s first robotic mission to Mars – revealing the sheer ingenuity and dedication that paved the way to reaching these extraordinary goals in the lethal environment of space. We also hear from the astronauts, who ultimately put their lives in the hands of the engineering teams, and space historians who explain how seemingly impossible these challenges were. As humanity now embarks on a bold new era of space exploration, this series illustrates how we stand on the shoulders of giants: the engineers who first dared to reach for space… and triumphed.